Blockchain Papers

Dalia Elwi, Osama Abu-Elnasr, A. S. Tolba, Samir Elmougy

Abstract Bitcoin is a digital cryptocurrency which had become the focus of scientific research in the modern era. Blockchain is the underlying technology of Bitcoin because of its decentralization, transparency, trust-less, and immutability features. However, blockchain can be considered the cause of Bitcoin scalability issues especially storage. Nodes in Bitcoin network need to store the full blockchain to validate transactions. By time, the blockchain size will be extremely huge. So, the full nodes will prefer to leave the network, and this leads to the blockchain being centralized and trusted. Therefore, security will be adversely affected. In this paper, we propose a Stateful Layered Chain Model which is based on storing accounts’ balances to reduce the size of the Bitcoin blockchain. This model changes the structure of the traditional blockchain from blocks to layers. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model reduces the size of blockchain by about 50.6%. Imlicitly, the transaction throughput can also be nearly doubled.

Joceli Mayer

The recent creation of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has enabled a multibillionaire market for digital artistic works including images or sequence of images, videos, and animated gifs. With this new trend issues regarding fraud, stolen works, authenticity, and copyright came along. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the watermarking techniques that can be employed to mitigate those issues. We will discuss transparency, robustness, and payload of watermarking techniques aiming to educate the artists, researchers, and developers about the many approaches that watermarking techniques provide and the resulting trade-offs. We focus on fragile watermarking techniques due to their high transparency for embedding into artistic works. We discuss the spread spectrum and Least Significant Bit techniques. We describe the usual process of NFT minting into a blockchain and propose a more secure certification protocol with watermarking which employs the same usual NFT minting offered by current marketplaces. The proposed certification protocol mints a checksum string into a blockchain, ensuring the validity of the watermark and the information embedded into this watermark. This proposed protocol validates the date of creation and author identification which are transparently embedded in the artistic work, thus, increasing the security and confidence of markets for artistic works transactions.

Xiang Zhang, Xiaona Zhang, Xiaorui Zhang, Wei Sun · 6 authors

The data in the blockchain cannot be tampered with and the users are anonymous, which enables the blockchain to be a natural carrier for covert communication. However, the existing methods of covert communication in blockchain suffer from the predefined channel structure, the capacity of a single transaction is not high, and the fixed transaction behaviors will lower the concealment of the communication channel. Therefore, this paper proposes a derivation matrix-based covert communication method in blockchain. It uses dual-key to derive two types of blockchain addresses and then constructs an address matrix by dividing addresses into multiple layers to make full use of the redundancy of addresses. Subsequently, to solve the problem of the lack of concealment caused by the fixed transaction behaviors, divide the rectangular matrix into square blocks with overlapping regions and then encrypt different blocks sequentially to make the transaction behaviors of the channel addresses match better with those of the real addresses. Further, the linear congruence algorithm is used to generate random sequence, which provides a random order for blocks encryption, and thus enhances the security of the encryption algorithm. Experimental results show that this method can effectively reduce the abnormal transaction behaviors of addresses while ensuring the channel transmission efficiency.

Wafaa N. Al-Sharu, Majdi K. Qabalin, Muawya Naser, Omar A. Saraerh

One of the most extensively used technologies for improving the security of IoT devices is blockchain technology. It is a new technology that can be utilized to boost the security. It is a decentralized peer-to-peer network with no central authority. Multiple nodes on the network mine or verify the data recorded on the Blockchain. It is a distributed ledger that may be used to keep track of transactions between several parties. No one can tamper with the data on the blockchain since it is unchangeable. Because the blocks are connected by hashes, the transaction data is safe. It is managed by a system that is based on the consensus of network users rather than a central authority. The immutability and tamper-proof nature of blockchain security is based on asymmetric cryptography and hashing. Furthermore, Blockchain has an immutable and tamper-proof smart contract, which is a logic that enforces the Blockchain’s laws. There is a conflict between the privacy protection needs of cyber-security threat intelligent (CTI) sharing and the necessity to establish a comprehensive attack chain during blockchain transactions. This paper presents a blockchain-based data sharing paradigm that protects the privacy of CTI sharing parties while also preventing unlawful sharing and ensuring the benefit of legitimate sharing parties. It builds a full attack chain using encrypted threat intelligence and exploits the blockchain’s backtracking capacity to finish the decryption of the threat source in the attack chain. Smart contracts are also used to send automatic early warning replies to possible attack targets. Simulation tests are used to verify the feasibility and efficacy of the suggested model.

Saba Abdulbaqi Salman, Sufyan Al-Janabi, Ali Makki Sagheer

Improving the voting system has become a widely discussed issue. Paper-based elections are not safe because of the possibility of changing and adding ballots. Consequently, many countries use e-voting systems to ensure security, authenticity and time efficiency. Blockchain e-voting systems can be adopted to reduce fraud and increase voting access from home, especially in pandemics. This paper suggests a blockchain e-voting system that tackles two security and authentication issues. The security has been ensured using hybrid public-key cryptography; the voter information is encrypted using the regional election office elliptic public key, while the homomorphic public supreme election authority encrypts the vote. Using homomorphic encryption for voice enables the calculations of results as the authority encrypts it without revealing the vote itself. Authentication has been improved for home voting by a robust login system. This login system consists of two steps. In the first step, the voter enters the site using his unique QR code number scanned by webcam; in the second step, the system checks the voter's face using a face recognition system by web camera to be routed to the voting page. Voting public keys are also authenticated using a digital certificate schema. The system has been tested to show its efficiency and suitability in block establishment time and the encryption and key generator randomness using NIST tests.

Baddepaka Prasad, S. Ramachandram

The second revolution in blockchain technology is smart contracts. Smart contracts are used in most of the blockchain applications like cryptocurrency, Health care, banking sectors, supply chain and IOT with different platforms like Fabric, Ethereum, Corda etc. In Ethereum blockchain, due to lack of inefficiency of the knowledge of technical developers and insecure programming languages for smart contracts, the attackers have exploited the smart contracts and the end users have lost millions of dollars like re-entrancy, king of ether throne attack, DoS, forcefully send ethers, multisig wallet, unexpected ether and poly network attack etc. In the year 2016, the attackers have exploited approximately $289 million US dollars with the help of re-entrancy vulnerability. The attackers have also attacked the smart contracts and broke the execution of that particular contracts through king of ether throne attack. In this paper, we propose a novel prevention and detection mechanisms for re-entrancy and king of ether throne attacks using time mechanisms and also implementing the same with proof of concepts for these vulnerabilities.

Qingliang Liu, Shuguo Yang, Jing Liu, Li Zhao · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Anubis Graciela de Moraes Rossetto, Christofer L. Sega, Valderi Reis Quietinho Leithardt

With the fast development of blockchain technology in the latest years, its application in scenarios that require privacy, such as health area, have become encouraged and widely discussed. This paper presents an architecture to ensure the privacy of health-related data, which are stored and shared within a blockchain network in a decentralized manner, through the use of encryption with the RSA, ECC, and AES algorithms. Evaluation tests were performed to verify the impact of cryptography on the proposed architecture in terms of computational effort, memory usage, and execution time. The results demonstrate an impact mainly on the execution time and on the increase in the computational effort for sending data to the blockchain, which is justifiable considering the privacy and security provided with the architecture and encryption.

Sung-Shine Lee, Alexandr Murashkin, Martin Derka, Jan Gorzny

The blockchain ecosystem has evolved into a multi-chain world with various blockchains vying for use. Although each blockchain may have its own native cryptocurrency or digital assets, there are use cases to transfer these assets between blockchains. Systems that bring these digital assets across blockchains are called bridges, and have become important parts of the ecosystem. The designs of bridges vary and range from quite primitive to extremely complex. However, they typically consist of smart contracts holding and releasing digital assets, as well as nodes that help facilitate user interactions between chains. In this paper we first provide a high level break-down of components in a bridge and the different processes for some bridge designs. Then, we analyse past exploits in the blockchain ecosystem that specifically targeted bridges. In doing this, we identify risks associated with bridge components.

Minghui Xu, Yihao Guo, Qin Hu, Zehui Xiong · 6 authors

Metaverse has rekindled human beings' desire to further break space-time barriers by fusing the virtual and real worlds. However, security and privacy threats hinder us from building a utopia. A metaverse embraces various techniques, while at the same time inheriting their pitfalls and thus exposing large attack surfaces. Blockchain, proposed in 2008, was regarded as a key building block of metaverses. it enables transparent and trusted computing environments using tamper-resistant decentralized ledgers. Currently, blockchain supports Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) for metaverses. However, the power of a blockchain has not been sufficiently exploited. In this article, we propose a novel trustless architecture of blockchain-enabled metaverse, aiming to provide efficient resource integration and allocation by consolidating hardware and software components. To realize our design objectives, we provide an On-Demand Trusted Computing Environment (OTCE) technique based on local trust evaluation. Specifically, the architecture adopts a hypergraph to represent a metaverse, in which each hyperedge links a group of users with certain relationship. Then the trust level of each user group can be evaluated based on graph analytics techniques. Based on the trust value, each group can determine its security plan on demand, free from interference by irrelevant nodes. Besides, OTCEs enable large-scale and flexible application environments (sandboxes) while preserving a strong security guarantee.

Leonhard Balduf, Martin Florian, Björn Scheuermann

We explore issues relating to the storage of digital art, based on an empirical investigation into the storage of audiovisual data referenced by non-fungible tokens (NFTs). We identify current trends in NFT data storage and highlight problems with implemented solutions. We particularly focus our investigation on the use of the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS), which emerges as a popular and versatile distributed storage solution for NFTs. Based on the analysis of discovered data storage techniques, we propose a set of best practices to ensure long-term storage survivability of NFT data. While helpful for forming the NFT art market into a legitimate long-term environment for digital art, our recommendations are also directly applicable for improving the availability and integrity of non-NFT digital art.

Ch. Rupa, Jaya Kumari D, Thippa Reddy Gadekallu, Celestine Iwendi

In today’s society, voting is crucial to choosing the representatives of the people. The current voting process is filled with a vast array of disputes and manipulations. The leader must be selected in a precise manner without any malpractices. In addition, the people and authorities are not happy with the election results and label them unpredictable. We offer a better solution to the current problems, such as tampering, non-residents voting outside of the polling place, quick results analysis, quick counting, and reduced use of staff and funds during the electoral franchise process. In this offer, blockchain technology is used to create the distributed application (dApp) framework that will be used for the proposed e-voting system. Additionally, it offers unique characteristics such as immutability, transparency, privacy, and reception freedom that reduce crimes involving the processing of sensitive data in the electoral process. Ganache, MetaMask, and specified dagger hashing algorithm are used to develop the dApp. A key strength of this paper is the statistical analysis of transactions on the blockchain. Moreover, it also provides security to voters’ identity and leads to immediate acceptable counting results with more accuracy.

Uzma Jafar, Mohd Juzaiddin Ab Aziz, Zarina Shukur, Hafiz Adnan Hussain

Electronic voting systems must find solutions to various issues with authentication, data privacy and integrity, transparency, and verifiability. On the other hand, Blockchain technology offers an innovative solution to many of these problems. The scalability of Blockchain has arisen as a fundamental barrier to realizing the promise of this technology, especially in electronic voting. This study seeks to highlight the solutions regarding scalable Blockchain-based electronic voting systems and the issues linked with them while also attempting to foresee future developments. A systematic literature review (SLR) was used to complete the task, leading to the selection of 76 articles in the English language from 1 January 2017 to 31 March 2022 from the famous databases. This SLR was conducted to identify well-known proposals, their implementations, verification methods, various cryptographic solutions in previous research to evaluate cost and time. It also identifies performance parameters, the primary advantages and obstacles presented by different systems, and the most common approaches for Blockchain scalability. In addition, it outlines several possible research avenues for developing a scalable electronic voting system based on Blockchain technology. This research helps future research before proposing or developing any solutions to keep in mind all the voting requirements, merits, and demerits of the proposed solutions and provides further guidelines for scalable voting solutions.

Yadi Wu, Guiyao Tie, Yu Yao, Jianxin Li · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

R Premkumar, S. Sathya Priya

Problem of secure transmission in cloud systems has been well studied; there exist number of approaches discussed around the problem. Number of threats has been identified in cloud which targets the services and data behind them. To mitigate the threats, different approaches are discussed in literature. The most approaches uses behavior of user in measuring trust, and some of them uses data level features in measuring trust of user. Also, various data encryption schemes are discussed which suffer with poor performance in security achievement. To handle this issue, an efficient Service Constraint NCBQ (Network Condition and Behavior Quality) Trust orient secure transmission protocol (SCNCQB-TSTP) is presented in this article. The proposed model involves in secure transmission by analyzing various factors of network, user behavior and quality of service. The method discovers set of routes to reach the service point and fetches several information about the transmission route like traffic, transmission frequency, bandwidth, IoT devices, hop count, throughput, and bandwidth utilization. According to the above information fetched about different routes, the method analyzes the trust of each route in three ways like Network Support Analysis, Behavior Support Analysis and QoS-Support Analysis. Based on the result of different analysis, the method estimates the value of Secure Transmission Score (STS). According to the value of STS, an optimal route has been selected to perform data transmission. Similarly, the method adapts Service Constraint Blockchain Model (SCBM) towards data security, which classifies the services in various levels. According to the service claimed by the user, the service data has been encrypted with specific class of scheme and key. Further, encrypted data has been placed is adapted to block chain to perform data transmission. The proposed SCNCQB-TSTP model improves the performance of secure transmission and data security.

Chia-Hui Wang, Chih‐Hao Hsu

According to the ever-growing supply and demand of IoT content, IoT big data in diversified applications are deemed a valuable asset by private and public sectors. Their privacy protection has been a hot research topic. Inspired by previous work on bounded-error-pruned IoT content market, we observe that the anonymity protection with robust watermarking can be developed by further pruning data for better resource-efficient IoT big data without violating the required quality of sensor service or quality of decision-making. In this paper, resource-efficient anonymity protection with watermarking is thus proposed for data consumers and owners of IoT big data market via blockchain. Our proposed scheme can provide the IoT data with privacy protections of both anonymity and ownership in IoT big data market with resource efficiency. The experiments of four different-type IoT datasets with different settings included bounded-errors, sub-stream sizes, watermark lengths, and ratios of data tampering. The performance results demonstrated that our proposed scheme can provide data owners and consumers with ownership and anonymity via watermarking the IoT big data streams for lossless compressibility. Meanwhile, the developed DApp with our proposed scheme on the Ethereum blockchain can help data owners freely share and trade with consumers in convenience with availability, reliability, and security without mutual trust.

Kranthi Kiran Reddy, Gutha Vijay Kumar, Sai Siddu Sirimulla, Chanan Singh · 6 authors

This article explores the use and impact of voting using blockchain technology. As a result of mounting worries about the honesty and security of conventional voting methods, especially in the digital era, the study tackles the requirement for an open, impenetrable, and robust method of conducting elections. A decentralized application on a blockchain platform is designed and implemented using the technique, which makes use of smart contracts for voter registration, ballot generation, and vote counting. The viability of blockchain technology in guaranteeing voter anonymity, data integrity, and cryptographic security are important discoveries. Online voting can be done securely and digitally using blockchain technology. It has great potential to reduce costs and increase voter turnout. Using Blockchain we can secure any application and work securely for that application. Therefore, cryptocurrency, healthcare, real estate, etc. Many applications use blockchain technology. *Blockchain technology encrypts votes, preventing any votes from being tampered with. It allows voters to vote for a candidate only once. The system reduces labor costs and counting errors by providing quick access to election results. This article explains solutions to solve the above problems. Our solution is to use an online voting system based on the Ethereum blockchain. That's why we connect surveys to blockchain technology

Rahmeh Ibrahim, Qasem Abu Al‐Haija, Ashraf Ahmad

The Internet of Things (IoT) has widely expanded due to its advantages in enhancing the business, industrial, and social ecosystems. Nevertheless, IoT infrastructure is susceptible to several cyber-attacks due to the endpoint devices' restrictions in computation, storage, and communication capacity. As such, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat to the security of the IoT. Attackers can easily utilize IoT devices as part of botnets to launch DDoS attacks by taking advantage of their flaws. This paper proposes an Ethereum blockchain model to detect and prevent DDoS attacks against IoT systems. Additionally, the proposed system can be used to resolve the single points of failure (dependencies on third parties) and privacy and security in IoT systems. First, we propose implementing a decentralized platform in place of current centralized system solutions to prevent DDoS attacks on IoT devices at the application layer by authenticating and verifying these devices. Second, we suggest tracing and recording the IP address of malicious devices inside the blockchain to prevent them from connecting and communicating with the IoT networks. The system performance has been evaluated by performing 100 experiments to evaluate the time taken by the authentication process. The proposed system highlights two messages with a time of 0.012 ms: the first is the request transmitted from the IoT follower device to join the blockchain, and the second is the blockchain response. The experimental evaluation demonstrated the superiority of our system because there are fewer I/O operations in the proposed system than in other related works, and thus it runs substantially faster.

Mohamed Allouche, Mihai Mitrea

The last decades have seen video production and consumption rise significantly: TV/cinematography, social networking, digital marketing, and video surveillance incrementally and cumulatively turned video content into the predilection type of data to be exchanged, stored, and processed. Belonging to video processing realm, video fingerprinting (also referred to as content-based copy detection or near duplicate detection ) regroups research efforts devoted to identifying duplicated and/or replicated versions of a given video sequence (query) in a reference video dataset. The present paper reports on a state-of-the-art study on the past and present of video fingerprinting, while attempting to identify trends for its development. First, the conceptual basis and evaluation frameworks are set. This way, the methodological approaches (situated at the cross-roads of image processing, machine learning, and neural networks) can be structured and discussed. Finally, fingerprinting is confronted to the challenges raised by the emerging video applications ( e.g. , unmanned vehicles or fake news) and to the constraints they set in terms of content traceability and computational complexity. The relationship with other technologies for content tracking ( e.g., DLT - Distributed Ledger Technologies) are also presented and discussed.

Zigui Jiang, Kai Chen, Hailin Wen, Zibin Zheng

Smart contract has been the core of blockchain systems and other blockchain-based systems since Blockchain 2.0. Various operations on blockchain are performed through the invocation and execution of smart contracts. This leads to extensive combinations between blockchain, smart contract, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical System (CPS) applications, and then many blockchain-based IoT or CPS applications emerge to provide multiple benefits to the economy and society. In this case, obtaining a better understanding of smart contracts will contribute to the easier operation, higher efficiency and stronger security of those blockchain-based systems and applications. Many existing studies on smart contract analysis are based on similarity calculation and smart contract classification. However, smart contract is a piece of code with special characteristics and most of smart contracts are stored without any category labels, which leads to difficulties of smart contract classification. As the back end of a blockchain-based Decentralized Application (DApp) is one or several smart contracts, DApps with labeled categories and open source codes are applied to achieve a supervised smart contract classification. A three-phase approach is proposed to categorize DApps based on various data features. In this approach, 5,659 DApps with smart contract source codes and pre-tagged categories are first obtained based on massive collected DApps and smart contracts from Ethereum, State of the DApps and DappRadar. Then feature extraction and construction methods are designed to form multi-feature vectors that could present the major characteristics of DApps. Finally, a fused classification model consisting of KNN, XGBoost and random forests is applied to the multi-feature vectors of all DApps for performing DApp classification. The experimental results show that the method is effective. In addition, some positive correlations between feature variables and categories, as well as several user behavior patterns of DApp calls, are found in this paper.

Suhag Pandya

The modern challenges of supply chain control arising from globalisation, decentralisation, and modernisation are rapidly exposed to data leakage, network attacks, and software flaws. Business stakeholders are turning to blockchain technology as a possible solution to improve modern supply chains’ reliability, integration, and visibility. Blockchain is an elaborate structure that remains relevant when managing product traceability, integration, and increasing general transparency. This article explores the possibility of blockchain technology enhancing the transparency, integrity, and security of decentralised voting systems. Blockchain, which is decentralised, irreversible and fully transparent, is an alternative solution to the world’s problems described by manipulation, fraud and lack of transparency inherent in the globalisation of voting systems. The paper considers several models of voting on the basis of blockchain technology, comparing their advantages, which consist of providing the inviolability of the election results as well as minimising the usage of the intermediaries’ services. Evaluating blockchain technology using election procedures as a perspective, this article explores its foundational features, such as cryptographic protections, consensus processes, and ever-executable contracts. Other issues that are named by the study as the challenges for implementing blockchain technology in voting include scalability, energy consumption, and legal issues. This research aims to respond to these questions for enhancing election systems in the digital world by reviewing the literature comprehensively on blockchain technology for decentralised voting and providing a brief overview of the current trend. The results highlight the need for more study into blockchain-based voting systems to resolve the technological and ethical issues that have been raised.

Dexin Zhu, Jun Zheng, Hu Zhou, Jianan Wu · 6 authors

Traditional video conference systems depend largely on computational complexity to ensure system security, but with the development of high-performance computers, the existing encryption system will be seriously threatened. To solve this problem, a hybrid encryption scheme for quantum secure video conferencing combined with blockchain is proposed in this study. In the system solution architecture, first, the quantum key distribution network is embedded in the classic network; then, the “classical + quantum” hybrid encryption scheme is designed according to the secret level required for the video conference content. Besides, the real-time monitoring module of the quantum key distribution network is designed to ensure that users can check the running state of the network at any time. Meeting minutes can be shared by combining with blockchain. In order to quickly query meeting minutes, a cache-efficient query method based on B+ tree is proposed. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional video conference system, the quantum secure video conference system sufficiently integrates the technical advantages of the quantum key distribution to resist the security threats such as channel eavesdropping and high-performance computational attacks while ensuring the stable operation of the classic system, thus providing a video conference system with a higher security level. Meanwhile, the query time cost of blockchain with different lengths is tested, and the query efficiency of the proposed method is 3.15-times higher than the original query efficiency of blockchain.

Yi Chen, Chung-Chiang Chen, Li‐Chuan Tang, Wei-Hua Chieng

Abstract NuText is a novel music-encoding technology based on numbered musical notation. This paper outlines the notation principles of numbered musical notation and delineates the conversion relationship and encoding protocol between NuText and numbered musical notation. Furthermore, this study demonstrates NuText's playback software and its practical applications, including digital artwork creation, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and social use, and identifies opportunities to develop it as a music technology. The encoding method proposed herein was implemented on PCs and mobile devices, and the method has been successfully applied to sports-oriented music. The image steganography method used in digital artwork creation, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and social use does not destroy images, and it has been implemented on mobile devices. NuText is a note-level encoding method, which has advantages for interpreting music connotations and a great potential in the development of music information retrieval and artificial intelligence composition. In future work, special musical skills may be added, including the modification of each note velocity, and this may be incorporated into the encoding specification to realize sound in virtual reality.

Wenxuan Yu, Minghui Xu, Dongxiao Yu, Xiuzhen Cheng · 6 authors

Payment channel network (PCN) is a layer-two scaling solution that enables fast off-chain transactions but does not involve on-chain transaction settlement. PCNs raise new privacy issues including balance secrecy, relationship anonymity and payment privacy. Moreover, protecting privacy causes low transaction success rates. To address this dilemma, we propose zk-PCN, a privacy-preserving payment channel network using zk-SNARKs. We prevent from exposing true balances by setting up \textit{public balances} instead. Using public balances, zk-PCN can guarantee high transaction success rates and protect PCN privacy with zero-knowledge proofs. Additionally, zk-PCN is compatible with the existing routing algorithms of PCNs. To support such compatibility, we propose zk-IPCN to improve zk-PCN with a novel proof generation (RPG) algorithm. zk-IPCN reduces the overheads of storing channel information and lowers the frequency of generating zero-knowledge proofs. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of zk-PCN in various settings.